At the close of the Munich Kirchentag, loyal German Catholics showed themselves eager for reformSitting in the rain with 100,000 people at the closing service of the recent Munich Kirchentag, I noticed that my free plastic rainhood was surplus stock from the August 2005 Cologne World Youth Day.
Then the sun shone, the crowds cheered, and the pope grinned his most benevolently vulpine grin, amidst talk of a Catholic renaissance in Germany.
The showers held off five years ago, but it's all over now.
For Bavarians, Catholicism is a way of life, not a dogmatic package. It's a matter of identity rather than conformity. The Bavarian Catholic church is too firmly embedded to be, as one traditional journalistic cliche has it, rocked by sexual abuse scandals.
However what is usually described as a crisis of trust runs though its heart, as 'Blackpool' runs through Blackpool rock.
Old certainties are not holding up well, and lay progressives are on the march.
If I wanted to devise an exquisite form of torture for English RC reactionary critics of the second Vatican council, I would force them to sit as I did recently with tens of thousands of Bavarian Catholics, cheering enthusiastically for the ending of compulsory celibacy, women's ordination, and birth control.
At one point I heard Fr Klaus Mertes, the Jesuit theologian who blew the whistle on sexual abuse at the Canisius College in Berlin, crack a joke — if it carries on like this, the only people we will be able to ordain will be women.
Laughter spread through the 8,000 in the hall, followed by a rousing round of rugby club applause.
A catastrophic collapse of trust was all around in Munich. I met young pilgrims, just back from Rome, telling of their shame at the way the church has behaved. There is a broad feeling the it has compromised its much-vaunted moral authority.
"It's as though you discover the police have been stealing cars," said another lay Catholic.
In the background dark suspicions pullulate, including one upon which I could not possibly comment, that the Vatican has been making up deficits in US contributions from the lucrative German church tax.
I detected two responses to the issue of sexual abuse, and its attendant collapse of trust.
The bishops acknowledge the existence of rotten apples in the barrel, and are willing to help the civil authorities to the utmost to root them out.
They hope that if they do this assiduously enough trust will return and everything can go back to the way it was. In the meantime they also expressed an undertone that feels got-at – partly because there are, in fact, people trying to get at the Catholic church.
Expressions of this undertone were, however, greeted by booing from the laity.
The second line is more challenging, and seemed to be taken by just about everyone who didn't happen to be a bishop. Yes there were rotten apples, but it is futile to deal with them unless underlying formation issues, weak leadership, and the culture that fed the cover-ups is addressed, if necessary by radical measures.
In other words, there's no point swatting wasps when you should be dealing with the nest.
This characteristically Teutonic systemic critique carries its own undertone that the ending of compulsory celibacy, along with the ordination of women cannot be far off.
Looking at the troubles of the RC church in Germany, some of whose bishops must wish they had acted earlier and more effectively as English RC bishops did, I would limit my own comment to some words of George Bell, a quintessentially Anglican lover of all things German and ecclesiastical, about an earlier and darker shame:
"No nation, no church, no individual is guiltless.
Without repentance and without forgiveness there can be no regeneration"
Many lay Bavarian Catholics wonder whether the regeneration, or the bounceback everybody applauded at the closing service, involves its own new reformation.